


Altered Stasis

by Rubyshade



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Gen, I wrote a lot of this before sleeping so if it reads dreamily it's only according to its heritage, Stasis, enjoy my lame summary lol it's a cool story I swear, interim fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:26:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24244246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubyshade/pseuds/Rubyshade
Summary: How did he get here? Where was he? What was going on?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	Altered Stasis

In the average, at-rest human, the heart beats four times to match a breath in, and four again on the breath out.

* * *

It was cool, and it was dark, and that was unusual.

How long had it been cool and dark for? Gordon was stiff, and that was new too. Something cool lay on the side of his neck, and despite knowing that he possessed two arms, he could not find either of them to investigate it.

Where were his arms?

Had someone said something?

Where was he?

He expected to feel panic, or fright, but none came. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open. Something in his neck, but was not his, twitched.

He opened his eyes. He was in the target practice range at Black Mesa, a concrete room with water-stained walls, lit by flickering, florescent lights. The ceiling was coated in unfinished, dusty foam insulation, held up by rusted I-beams.

It must have been the third Monday already – time passed so quickly when the days were filled with tests and paperwork and writing up lab reports. The target range had a small observation room, with a plate glass window high in the wall. One of the guards Gordon knew by sight but not introduction stood behind it. Otis, he thought. That was his name, right?

His voice crackled over the loudspeaker.

“Go ahead and hit those targets, Gordon. Then you’ll be done for the day.”

His MP5 was on a table next to one of the rusted supports. Gordon was three targets in when the gun went _clic_ and he was out of ammunition. He returned to the table and fetched another magazine, slotted it into the MP5, threw forward the bolt. The cool metal was familiar, even through his gloves. The smell was too, a whiff of unfinished metal tinged with graphite.

It was nice, he thought, that Black Mesa supplied ammunition for SMGs, even though the biggest firearm allowed on the premises were the handguns carried by Black Mesa security.

Where had this gun come from?

The magazine ran empty again. Gordon slotted the next one in, pushed the bolt forward and took aim at the last target. He was supposed to meet Eli for a quick lunch after this, then get to work on his first draft of the findings from last week’s experiment.

The smell in his nose was familiar, not the rust of the target range but the graphite smell of MP5 smoke. Where had this gun come from?

If he could get an ok first draft done this week, he would have time to take a trip outdoors and hang around on the surface, get some fresh air. God knows he needed it. But he needed to start sooner, rather than later.

The metal was slick. Where had this gun come from?

His fire halted with a _clic_. Out again?

Where had

He had to get his draft started.

Where

“That’s fine, Freeman.”

Where

It _was_ Otis. Maybe he should introduce himself on his way out – it seemed odd to know someone who didn’t know they were known.

Where had

What did Eli say he was reading last week? Some graduate thesis, proofing it for a friend’s kid who was finishing their second degree at MIT. He had said it raised some interesting questions – Gordon was looking forward to picking his brain about it at lunch.

Where

Gordon ejected the last bullet casing manually and set the MP5 on the table. The gun was heavy and the table wobbled – the spent casing fell to the ground with a rattle _,_ rolling in a circle and coming to rest against the base of the corroded I-beam with a resonant _tink_. This was some Marine’s gun, that was right.

A _Marine’s_ gun?

Something groaned, metallic. Gordon gasped and stepped back as the rusted support beam bent at the rusted-out band, then toppled away from him with a screech of tearing metal. It smashed through the observation window, and glass fell in a cacophony of sharp clinks.

Gordon gaped and inhaled to call for Otis, to make sure he was ok, but something stopped him. He listened. A piece of glass fell to the cement with a soft _tink_.

He must have heard a scream, and now nothing came from the office. Had it even been Otis? There was silence now – not a grunt, no moan of pain, no reassurance. Silence.

Gordon left his gun on the table and scaled the beam. He crunched fangs of broken glass off the sill with his gloved hands before climbing carefully in the window, preparing himself for the bloody worst.

But the office was empty, the only movement the blinking of a cursor on a green computer screen. Gordon had seen plenty of dead bodies by now, so the dread that filled him was almost worse than the defeat and resignation he knew so well.

Where had he seen dead bodies in such quantities?

It was a good thing Otis had made it out, thought Gordon.

Where had he seen dead bodies?

He should go back, open a report with Facilities. Someone had to make a report about what had happened.

Stacked, heaped in the corridors. Bloody, slack faces.

It wouldn’t surprise Eli to hear about this later. He loved to complain about Black Mesa’s aging infrastructure. Maybe if he brought Alyx to lunch she would tell the story of the ceiling tile that fell on her stuffed animals again.

_Alyx…_

Alyx and Eli and Azian were fine. He should go back to the target range.

At least Eli had

He should go back to the target range.

If Eli had made it

He should go back to the target range.

The green light of the monitor shone on the walls. Gordon’s grip tightened unconsciously on the broken glass of the sill. He stood perfectly still, focused with a look of great concentration on an unknowable point in the middle distance. Glass crunched faintly under his Kevlar glove, the only sound.

He had killed a man for the MP5. He’d bashed his head in with a crowbar, watched the blood mix with the smears of alien fluids over concrete and sandbags, red and green and red…

The resonance cascade…

Gordon _moved_ , kicked open the door to the little office in one fluid movement. Outside was a dim and clanging access stairway, warm and close and smelling strongly of rust. Steps flew past two at a time under his feet, the soles of his boots crashing against the iron steps. He could hear something else in his pounding heartbeat, feel it in his adrenaline-jangled nerves – he was being hunted, by something alien, something that had held his mind hostage.

It was minutes before Gordon slowed to a halt on a landing, HEV-assisted lungs heaving. He leaned over the railing and looked up.

Above him, iron stairs doubled back and forth, climbing up and up until they blurred away into dimness. Below him, stairs coiled down at right angles into the dark, the lights on each landing receding down as far as the eye could see into a dull fog.

His heart skipped a beat, and he took three careful steps backwards. His back hit the wall, sending another pulse of adrenaline through his system. The crashing echoes of his descent were beginning to fade, echoing fainter, fainter, fainter – terror seized Gordon, and he opened his mouth to call or to whisper, anything to stave off the silence of that infinite stairwell that now seemed to close in around him like a humid night. He breathed, but the sound stuck in his throat and as he began to shake in exhaustion, the air drew in like a vise and silence was complete.

He dropped to his knees. They didn’t hit iron steps, instead something hard and quiet. He blinked. The walls swam and resolved into nothing. The ground under his hands was faintly glassy.

He got to his feet. He was no longer out of breath. It was dark, but he could see. A light seemed to be reflecting off the ground from somewhere, but no source presented itself. The air was cooler and lighter, and went down easy. He must have been indoors – the air was too still for anything else – but he saw neither walls nor a ceiling, only a flat, glassy plane lit by a faint, directionless light with no visible source.

Gordon stood for a while, then began to walk. He didn’t get tired. His neck itched. Despite the apparent size of the space, the sound of his breathing and footsteps fell flat and close against his ears. He was no longer wearing the HEV suit, he realized dully, but the outfit he had been planning to wear to lunch…

Eventually, something appeared, suddenly as though from a fog he couldn’t see. It was visible only in silhouette, a dark shape against the highlights on the glassy floor. It was about waist height, and shaped like a hospital bed - or a coffin. Gordon approached it with wary steps, putting out a hand to guide himself around it in the near-dark, and it fell upon something cool and dry.

Gordon pulled his hand back with a sharp intake of breath, heartrate spiking. Time passed, and nothing happened, and he gently placed a hand down again in the cool, still darkness.

It was cloth. He moved his hand farther, into cloth and something else, soft and fibrous, like a spider’s web that failed to part. He explored – there was that dry, cool surface.

It was skin, he realized with a start. And oddly familiar bristles…

Cloth rustled behind him, an explosion in the stillness. Gordon spun to look.

Behind him the unnatural light of the void had grown to a wan, colorless predawn. It outlined the shape of a man. He was taller than Gordon by half a head, and faint light caught the collar of his suit as it encircled his pale neck. His face was sickly, and from dark sockets, unnaturally green eyes shone with reflected light.

Gordon took a fearful step back, and the backs of his thighs bumped the pedestal. He gripped the edge, praying that whatever lay within would not awaken. The G-Man inhaled. It was the first time Gordon had heard him do so. The edges of his mouth twitched upwards, but the way his eyes creased could be attributed to nothing but coincidence.

“ _Well_. _Doc_ tor Freeman.”

Gordon’s fingers curled around the rim of the casket. He looked up at the man in the suit, swallowed. He opened his mouth. A disbelieving question died on his lips, and the G-Man laughed, a soft grunt of dry amusement. He moved, and Gordon watched him round the edge of the casket, feeling for all the world like a hunted animal.

“Cat got your… _tongue_ , has it?” He inhaled, a rattling, apneic sound. “ _Well_. Not – terribly surprising, considering your. _Present_ , circumstances.”

The two of them faced each other from opposite sides of the casket.

The man – if it was a man - in the suit reached down into the cradle. Gordon dared not look as he felt something move inside his neck.

“You know. You’re not supposed to. _Be_ , here… _after all_.”

Gordon looked down.

His eyes were closed, and he wore only the undergarments that fit under the HEV suit. His skin was deathly pale. His beard was patchy, but it had been so since the beginning of the terrible day that he now, only now, remembered in perfect clarity. His head lay at a nauseating angle, the underside of his jaw exposed, held in place by a tangle of white filaments that seemed to grow straight from the inside of the casket. 

Two glossy, hefty tubes were buried in his neck, wormed beneath the skin where Gordon knew his pulse throbbed. Pale blue liquid shone inside them. Two more were buried in the exposed veins at the crook of his elbow.

It looked painful, yet - he felt nothing at all. His legs wobbled, and he clutched the edge of the casket. He couldn’t look away.

“Not to – _worry_ , _Mr_. Freeman. Only a rou _tine_ , ah – check _up_.”

The tubes in his neck throbbed. The color of the liquid inside began to deepen, the blue fading as a dark liquid began to filter up into his neck. Gordon felt distantly nauseous.

“A _shame_ , hm, to lose that brain of yours, to the _ravages_ of – _time_? Don’t – _worry_ , though.”

The world grew dark around Gordon. His eyes were closed. He could still see.

“Soon enough, you will be. _Needed_ , again.”

* * *

It took 10 years and 20 heartbeats before Gordon Freeman thought again. He remembered nothing between his breaths at all.

**Author's Note:**

> *kicks down door* Happy late Resonance Cascade Day!!!! Finally I contribute to the fandom (such as it is/was) of the work that shaped so much of my childhood for some reason. Special shoutouts to Mark Laidlaw for the developmental short fiction in the back of Raising The Bar, to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_Rvde784Q) for inspiring me and giving me a damn title, and to a pal on discord for helping me with the gun bits. Turns out there's a lot to know about guns.
> 
> I've been bingeing the Magnus Archives the past few weeks, can you tell? Nothing meant as an explicit crossover, but if you've picked up on any vibes, that's why. ;)


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